Quote:
Originally Posted by Igzy
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/...h.html?start=1
"But here's the deal. Whenever you bring people together, religious or not, to get something done together, history demonstrates what you are going to get. First you'll get something done: you'll start a tutoring program or build a community center or form a soccer league or whatever. But this is what you'll also get: politics, bureaucracy, legalism, pettiness, backstabbing, greed, dishonesty, conformism, self-interest—and that's on the good days! Now add religion to the mix, so that the people involved do politics, bureaucracy, legalism, backstabbing, and so forth with a pious smile on their faces. That's the church many days.
|
Why is this true? I would suggest several factors are at play.
1. Man is flesh. According to the Lord's parable of the Good Samaritan the Church is likened to a hospital. What is truly not scriptural is the idea that any church would be composed of saints who were not sinful or fleshly.
2. Man has struggled with creating human government for 6,000 years. The US constitution is a major event in this history, as are the writings of Karl Marx, the writings of Plato, the French Revolution, etc.
The fact that man as a society is much more than the sum of his parts has been proven over and over again. Likewise the fact that man hasn't figured out how to govern himself has also been proven over and over again. I am reminded of the Lord's prophecy "As the lightening flashes in the East and Shines unto the West, so also is the coming of the Son of Man". We are here at the end of the age, we have satellite telecommunications. We can now see live video shining in the West of bombs flashing in the East. Everyone should be amazed at how the Scientific age has put such amazing power at our control. Yet for all of our technological brilliance, rocket ships, lasers, etc. Still we haven't figured out the most basic thing of how to govern ourselves, still we are looking for the Son of Man to come and save us.
Igzy "The Church is an organism, not an organization." Heady words. Unfortunately the Bible doesn't say this.
Well, the Bible does say that the Church is "the Body of Christ". This is not a parable or a figure of speech, it is a statement of fact. This is spoken by Paul in his epistles, but it is also seen in Acts where the Lord tells Paul "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest". Now the human body is organized in a wonderful way, but we wouldn't refer to the human body as an organization but as an organism. Taken in context it is not correct to say that the Bible doesn't say this.